Lamont Baldwin, a 54-year-old former school security guard accused of sexually abusing underage students at Princeton Middle School, did not speak Thursday night as he walked to the front door of the Cincinnati Police Department’s District 1 headquarters.
Baldwin stepped inside to turn himself in and face 12 felony charges of gross sexual imposition against four students, all of whom were under 13 at the time the alleged offenses occurred.
His lawyer, Clyde Bennett, remained outside and repeatedly insisted that the assaults had been fabricated by the students identified as victims.
“I think if you go into any school and you asked a bunch of students about a teacher or an authority figure, ‘What has this person done to you?’, I guarantee more than one of them is going to say something,” Bennett said. “I’m not convinced of the charges.”
Baldwin worked as a security monitor at Princeton Middle School from 1996 to 2019 and spent a short time as a wrestling coach. According to court documents and Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, who announced the charges Thursday morning, his first assault on a student happened in 2014. The incidents occurred both in the school and off school grounds, court documents said.
“These cases are disturbing, and I will never understand people who sexually abuse children,” Deters wrote in a news release Thursday. “Parents expect that school is a safe place and school employees betraying that trust hurt not just the victim but the entire family, school system and community. We take these cases seriously and want to make sure that dangerous people are not in contact with our children.”
